Nothing to do, part two

One way that many in my office have chosen to pass the seemingly endless nine-hour day of doing basically nothing is to chat. As I mentioned in some of my earlier postings about my general desire to be left alone, I hate chat. I can do it for a few minutes if it involves a halfway interesting topic and we get to inject just the right amount of cynicism into the discussion, but after maybe five minutes tops I start squirming and shuffling and wishing someone would set off a fire alarm.

We have two kinds of chat in my office: the one-on-one discussion spoken in quiet tones appropriate to the situation, and the wide-open gabfest that draws in everyone in the room whether they want to be involved or not. There’s one person in particular notorious for initiating the latter, and she sits about ten feet behind me. Her intended target audience is the woman to her left, which means she’s pointing her larynx directly at my back, so it’s hard to ignore as she spews out the tedious details of her life in a steel-guitar twang only slightly less nasal than the city of Nashville.

In continuation of the timeline begun in yesterday’s posting, I’ll be including random comments from Kim that might give some indication of how her beloved daughter, her deadbeat husband and her “mawm’n daddy” (parents?) make her existence a living hell, God love ‘em.

6 am – Kim arrives for her designated shift and offers the entire room a hearty “hah thay-er” (hello?). Since much of third shift is still here, nearing the end of their interminable night, they’re stirred awake and are able to get ready to go home. Whatever else you can say about Kim, she makes a great alarm clock.

6:15 – I’m finishing up the only job I’ll work on the entire day. The errors I’ve encountered not only have to be fixed but they have to be recorded in a hare-brained quality improvement scheme abandoned long ago but whose ruins still remain. The point of the project was to quantify the errors so they could be “bucketed” (meaning “categorized”, not “carried out to the compost heap”) and we could learn how to improve on our weaknesses. Instead, the error rate is viewed primarily in the way it potentially affects our paycheck – the more errors we have, the lower any bonus we might achieve at the end of the year. So part of my job has become weighing whether errors are serious enough to fix and record, or whether I should just look the other way. Probably not what the quality improvement folks had intended.

6:25 – Fragment of Kim's life: “Jessica’s school pictures are just darling, but you have to buy a whole package to get the discount. That pitcher company is smart.” Judging from the size of the print on her desk, she’s opted for the Mercator projection wall-mounted package.

6:40 – There’s a knock on the outer door that leads from the parking lot. Nobody ever wants to field these, as it’s usually lost truckers looking to borrow a phone book, but we can’t let them in for security reasons. Rick, the poor soul who responds, discovers the itinerant nurse who has arrived to conduct this morning’s insurance-related health screenings. Even though these were set up at least a month ago, no one knows what we’re supposed to do with this woman. We don’t even know where the screenings will take place -- maybe behind a large skid of boxes in the warehouse? -- so she can’t even get set up before her first patients arrive. Because the woman is elderly, Rick clearly violates company policy by offering her the option of coming in to sit in a corner, or to wait in her car for someone who knows what’s going on. She chooses to cool her scuffed white heels in the dark parking lot.

6:55 – “The fence is done. I painted the ceiling but it’s kinda blotchy. Then I started the vacuuming…”

7:05 – Time to dig up the first distraction of the day. I choose these carefully based on a number of factors, variety being one key but also the presence of upper managers. Since it’s at least a half-hour till the first of these arrive, I break out the newspaper for a little light reading. I’ll catch up on late-breaking news later online, when my intent stare into the computer screen could be mistaken for work.

7:30 – I clean my glasses, take my cholesterol medicine and eat some grapes. Later, I’ll slip into the restroom to cut my toenails. Wildlife studies have shown that grooming builds animals’ self-esteem, but I’m drawing the line at picking nits off my production coordinator.

7:40 – Kim is doing cross-stitch: “blank, blank, blank, space, blank, blank, space, blank … isn’t this beautiful?”

7:45 – The first of the dayshift managers arrive. It’s the one who sent me an email on my enforced day off this week asking my help in checking over a new corporate website. I’m delaying until personally asked, because I know how fast these must-be-done-yesterday projects evolve into something no longer needed. I’ve done way too much work in this job that ended up being wasted (see September posting about training temporaries for a week only to see them let go the following week). Now I’ll need to calculate all my moves around the office to either look busy or to avoid walking past her.

7:55 – Adam and I sign up for the October office refrigerator cleaning. There’s a sheet attached to the door with monthly sign-up slots, which means it hasn’t been cleaned since we last did it in March. It’s not something you’d think I like, but when we did it last spring it took only about an hour and we ended up with a nice take-home bag of abandoned frozen dinners, bottled drinks, and some exquisite condiments.

8:25 – I’ve got 35 minutes to kill until my 9 am health screening. I’ll try to get away with a little close-to-the-vest crossword puzzling, which hopefully won’t be noticed. Nobody cares if we’re seen goofing off, since management knows as well as anyone that our work has dried up. But I’ve got these off-line projects I’m trying to avoid. There’s another one out there somewhere – a different manager approached me last week about a procedure she wanted me to review – but the ball was left in her court when I asked her to email it to me, which she apparently forgot to do. So much of what goes on in the modern office feels like a rain-hampered game of tennis – as long as your last discussion got the sodden mass over to the other person’s side, you’re clear.

8:55 – “Some days Jessica carries her lunch to school and some days she doesn’t. I tell her, Jessica, you’re not allowed to get something extra except on Friday.”

8:57 – “My feet were big when I was young. They used to call me ‘bigfoot’. Kids can be so mean.”

8:59 – “… the bats flew down and landed on her head and tried to make a nest in her hay-ir!”

I’ll pick up at 9 am and my health screening appointment on the next posting. Four hours down and only five to go.